Threat actors cripple recoverability by encrypting victim data, wiping archives, and destroying backups. The Veeam 2025 Ransomware Trends Report revealed that 89% of organizations had their backup repositories targeted, with an average of 34% being modified or deleted.
This stresses the importance of maintaining isolated and immutable copies of your backup as part of cyber resilience strategies and best practices to help defend against evolving cyber threats.
But what is an immutable backup, and how does it fortify your organization’s resiliency strategy?
In object-oriented and functional programming, an immutable object is any object whose state cannot be modified after it is created. Similarly, immutable backups are backup copies that cannot be edited, deleted, or overwritten once created and stored, until the predefined retention period expires.
Achieved through Write Once, Read Many (WORM), Continuous Data Protection (CDP), strong encryption, and stringent access controls, immutable backups guarantee that data remains secure, even if threat actors attempt to encrypt, corrupt, or delete the stored copies.
In fact, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), also recommends implementing immutable backups to counter sophisticated ransomware attacks.
Threat actors, increasingly aided by advancements in AI and global connectivity, continually search for vulnerabilities in security defenses. One of their prime targets is the backup repository, since compromising it can cripple recoverability.
This is where immutable backups make a critical difference. Once written, they are locked against changes or deletion, making them resistant to ransomware. Even if malware encrypts production data, the immutable copy stays intact, serving as a trusted recovery source to restore operations.
Ransomware isn’t the only reason immutable backups are critical. Beyond protecting data encryption, immutability prevents data loss from changes or accidental deletions. This is essential for simplifying compliance adherence in regulated industries like healthcare or finance that demand strict data retention policies.
Additionally, disaster recovery strategies should include immutable backups to ensure seamless business continuity in the event of a disaster (whether a natural disaster, hardware failure, or cyberattack). Immutable backups can provide a reliable, cost-effective, and fast source for data recovery.
While traditional backups support disaster recovery, they are vulnerable to modification, deletion, or encryption caused by human error, misconfiguration, or cyberattacks. Immutable backups eliminate these risks by ensuring tamper-proof, unalterable copies throughout the retention period. This makes immutable backups essential for organizations seeking reliable protection, regulatory compliance, and operational continuity against modern threats.
Building on this foundation, UnitedLayer’s Double-Play Immutability, powered by Veeam, delivers enterprise-grade data protection and business continuity. Here is how it works.
UnitedLayer’s leverages a strong partnership with Veeam, integrating their powerful Backup & Replication with UnitedLayer’s secure, scalable infrastructure. The architecture, as depicted in the image, features a scale-out backup repository model that protects workloads both on-premises and within UnitedLayer’s data centers. This approach enables Double-Play Immutability, ensuring two independent immutable copies for resilient backup protection.
UnitedLayer’s Double-Play Immutability Powered by Veeam
The backup architecture begins with the UL Resource Cluster, which runs VMware ESXi and hosts multiple VMs and vApps. A vApp is a logical group of one or more VMs. Every vApp is described with a set of operational details, or vApp metadata, containing information such as owner settings, access rights settings, network settings (including organization network connections), lease settings, and so on.
On-prem Veeam Backup Cluster receives backups from these vApps (all VMs, along with the vApp metadata), storing them in a hardened repository to guarantee immutability. Then, backup data is securely transferred to the UnitedLayer Data Center (right side of the image), where a second Veeam Backup Cluster also implements a hardened immutable repository.
Note that after a backup is created, it is ideal to scan it using malware detection methods for an additional layer of protection.
Both copies—on-premises and in the UnitedLayer data center—are fully self-describing and recoverable. Should ransomware or disaster compromise one location, a clean, immutable backup always remains accessible at the other, enabling uninterrupted business continuity.
Ransomware attacks not only threaten business continuity but can also damage an organization’s reputation and erode trust among customers and end users. The financial impact can be substantial, including costs from downtime, lost productivity, and potential regulatory fines or legal actions.
With UnitedLayer’s Immutable Backup solution, enterprises gain a secure, tamper-proof foundation for business continuity, ensuring rapid and reliable recovery even in the face of ransomware, accidental deletion, or system compromise.
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